Ipe vs Mahogany Decking Part II

Today we are continuing our Wood Comparison Series with Part 2 of Ipe vs Mahogany Decking. If you need a refresher or missed it, be sure to read Part 1 to get the most of this side by side breakdown.

Characteristics You Can Touch – Grain and Texture

The look and feel of wood can be a big decision maker when people are selecting wood for a project. When building hardwood decks, you ideally want to find a healthy balance of beautiful grain and pleasant texture that allows for people to easily walk on your deck in their bare feet.

You will find many similarities in ipe and genuine mahogany grain. Both can come in in a variety of grain styles. They are normally found with a straight grain, however, both are known to have irregularities.

Mahogany, however, does set itself apart from ipe in the look of its grain. Genuine mahogany will often have beautifully intricate and wavy patterns, the kind of look that first made European royalty fall in love with the wood. With the right oil, genuine mahogany looks like wooden marble. 

Genuine Mahogany Decking Toronto - Green World Lumber

You may occasionally find both ipe and genuine mahogany with interlocking grains, which would make them slightly more difficult to machine with. We therefore recommend that you make sure you are looking for straight or moderately irregular grained lumber, especially if you are doing a DIY deck.

On the same note, both ipe and genuine mahogany have textures that make them both great for decks. They can range from uniform-medium to fine. What this means is that once sanded and properly prepared for deck installation, your hardwood deck will be smoothe.

The Wood Database has a fantastic simple glossary that explains these terms.

The Price of Genuine Mahogany and Ipe

When building your backyard deck in Canada, the price of decking hardwood is always going to be a factor.

With that said, there are a lot of things you need to consider when contemplating what wood you want to use for your deck. The popular 5/4×6 sized piece is a good example to show the price difference between ipe and genuine mahogany. Depending on the supplier and the volume of lumber you are ordering, ipe wood is about 20-30% more than genuine mahogany.

That is just the cost of the wood on it’s own. It is important to remember that you will have to pay for freight and labour costs for the wood you select. As ipe is an incredibly dense and hard wood, it is harder to work with. Contractors charge more to install an ipe deck as the wood requires more hours of labour and machine parts. This is because ipe wood is significantly more difficult to machine and cut than its mahogany counterpart.

While genuine mahogany cannot compete with ipe in terms of its density or hardness, proper maintenance will keep your mahogany deck lasting as long for a fraction of the price. So if you are looking for hardwood decking in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, or anywhere else in Ontario and Quebec, request a quote from Green World Lumber. We offer competitive prices that include freight to your location.

Is Ipe and Genuine Mahogany Sustainable?

When you are comparing ipe vs mahogany for your hardwood deck, you will want to know everything about the wood in order to make a sound buying decision.

Both ipe and mahogany have a past of being abused by loggers and cut without any thoughts to the future of the species.

The question of, “is ipe wood sustainable,” is extremely difficult to answer. There are definitely places that follow proper regulations and international standards on ipe forest sustainability. However, these get overshadowed by the greedy, underhanded methods that illegal logging groups practice, as we have talked about before. Guerilla loggers are either applying for permits while grossly inflating the quantity of ipe in a forest region or they are simply using violence to get what they want. Once the wood has gone through the mill, it is almost impossible to determine if the ipe wood was logged sustainably or illegally.

Recognizing that unregulated harvesting of old-growth genuine mahogany would lead to the extinction of the species, different countries have taken up initiatives to answer the question, “is genuine mahogany sustainable?” As we have mentioned previously, the Fijian government has created one of the most successful plantation operations of genuine mahogany in the world. This allows people to enjoy the beauty and versatility of mahogany, like mahogany decking, but to feel at peace knowing that they bought their lumber from a sustainable source.

It is with the utmost confidence that Green World Lumber can offer sustainably grown genuine mahogany that has been sourced from Fiji’s regulated plantation forests in order to be available to you, the consumer, to make your outdoor paradise come true.

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